An Exceptional Week!

19 August 2017

President and Sister Fenn are such wonderful teachers! We had our mission conference this week and it was exceptional!! Sister Fenn talked about how, as a teenager, she had the experience one summer of sitting on the porch of their home, with her father (Bruce R. McConkie), while they read the Book of Mormon together. He taught her how to mark her scriptures and to make notes in the margin. She said her mother never joined them because her grandfather, President Joseph Fielding Smith, was living with them at that time and her mother spent the evenings with him. During that time, she marked what her father marked and made the notes that he made. Since then, she has read and marked several copies of the Book of Mormon, yet, she sometimes finds herself going back to the copy she marked that summer - to see what her father would have marked. She shared other experiences she has had while reading the Book of Mormon, and bore strong testimony of the truth and value of it.

Then, President Fenn taught us on the topic of “What the Book of Mormon Teaches Us about the Atonement.” He pointed out that the Bible teaches us the history of Christ, but the Book of Mormon teaches us His doctrine. He spoke for an hour and didn’t quite finish, but, what a privilege it was to be in that meeting and hear him teach! The hour just flew by!

Recently, a brother in our mission, Elder Mike Thornock, took some photos of the Temple Square area shortly after a rain. They're beautiful, so I'm sharing!

Everyone says this one depicts the “celestial bubble” we live in here. :-)

I had an opportunity to spend some time this week with Sister Gayane Zohrabyan, who is from Armenia. (I have mentioned her in a previous post.) She told me that when she was a young girl, she and her friends used to love reading a story called The Golden City. In the Golden City, there were flowers blooming everywhere; it was peaceful and lovely; and, everyone was happy. She said that when she came to Salt Lake City for her mission, it was June, and flowers were blooming all over Temple Square, and, she felt the Spirit that is here – and, she wrote home to tell her friends, "I'm living in the Golden City!"

She has extended her mission a couple of times and will be going home in November, but, is working toward getting a green card so she can return (because her son and daughter live here.) I have loved getting to know her!

We got some more new missionaries this week! We're SO happy!! We lose four this month, but, we got three, so that's pretty good. They all three are top notch, too!

More news for this week is that Bob traded in our car and we are now driving an SUV instead of a sedan - the same color as the one we traded. He’s enjoying learning all the ins and outs of it while we run errands, etc.